Culinalery posts tend to be somewhat popular, especially with the foodie set, and the Breakfast Beer Week seemed to be well-received. We also used the week to experiment with social media. Drunken Speculation has a brand new Facebook page, which you should go and like now because, as I said early last week, the sooner we get a decent number of likes, the sooner I can stop plugging it. If you want to be kept up-to-date, like the Facebook page. Or follow on Twitter or Instagram. Or go RSS. Or follow on WordPress. Or just manually check the blog everyday. Whatever suits you.

Another tweet from @AleOfATime, after sparking last week’s discussion on #NotForGays. I spent a bit of time catching up on Luke’s and @MelbDave’s podcast on the weekend (also confusingly named Ale of a Time) and there is a scary alignment of Luke’s and my own opinions. Nonetheless, this tweet started a discussion about the beer nerd’s perception of their alcohol consumption and health, which seems to be the topic du jour lately, with “alcohol-fuelled” violence in the news and a couple of prominent bloggers taking month-long breaks from beer. For me, it strikes home because we’ve had a couple of boozey weeks, which makes you feel like shit the day after and is not conducive to doing the exercise you need to work it off. I was planning to take the last week off beer but I quickly realised that a post-work beer is part of my daily unwinding. One or two is sufficient to achieve the desired effect, which I’m comfortable with but not when combined with big, boozey weekends. It needs close monitoring to be kept in moderation and ensuring it doesn’t negatively affect other aspects of one’s life.

Brewsvegas is going to give the beer scene some more exposure, but better still, it’s going to highlight Brisbane as being the new, “hip” place that it’s emerging to be. Gone are the days when Queenslander’s would roll up to their local, order a pint of XXXX and eat a cheap, 6oz steak and chips. Brisbanes tastes are changing; it’s becoming more refined. Appreciation for quality is slowly making it’s way into the minds of residents in the Sunshine State and I really feel that Brewsvegas will be the beacon that gets the rest of the country to stand up and take notice in a serious way.

To be fair, Brisbane has been going that way for ten to fifteen years now. Maybe Brewsvegas will be the event that finally solidifies that for people in the rest of the country. I, for one, am excited to find out.

If you want to join us by being brave and shave on the 13th March, sign up to our team – Newstead Balding Co. – by clicking here. Alternatively, just turn up that afternoon or evening and make a donation before lopping off those locks.

You can sponsor me by clicking here and Mark by clicking here. I’ve set myself a personal target of $500 and with your help I’ll get there and maybe even surpass it.

The unexpected draw was the annual release of a seasonal beer that brewer Vinnie had created on a whim six years before, known as Pliny the Younger… Russian River Brewing Co. had done no advertising for the event and had never bottled a single drop of the beer, yet here on that surprising day were hundreds of people waiting for release day.

The beer was gone in less than a day. Within hours, half-gallon jugs, known as growlers, were showing up on the online auction site eBay with asking prices well over $100.

…ale, the original English unhopped fermented malt drink, was still regarded as different, and separate, from, beer, the hopped malt drink brought over from continental Europe at the beginning of the 15th century, 200 years earlier. It was made by different people: Norwich had five “comon alebrewers” and nine “comon berebrewars” in 1564. In 1606 (the year Macbeth was performed at the Globe theatre) the town council of St Albans, 25 or so miles north of London, agreed to restrict the number of brewers in the town to four for beer and two for ale, to try to halt a continuing rise in the price of fuelwood.

Adverts for “French” beer Kronenbourg 1664 have been banned for falsely implying that the brewing and all of the hop production takes place in France…

The press ad said: “If you find a better tasting French beer, we’ll eat our berets,” and continued: “The French know a thing or two about taste. That’s why Kronenbourg 1664 is always brewed with the aromatic Strisselspalt hop for a taste supreme.”

Back in the 1970s, Bill Gates infused Microsoft with the ethos of not becoming IBM, a gigantic, unwieldy company that had no capacity to innovate or nimbly respond to new technologies. In about 1995, Microsoft became IBM. In the early 2000s, Google used “don’t be evil” as a philosophical shorthand for directing the company not to become Microsoft. (The motto was “a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent.”) Sometime in the last few years Google became Microsoft.

No, for me the sign that we were truly going to made it was when I saw a bottle of good beer smashed in a gutter. It was about four years ago. I can’t remember if it was a bottle of Epic Pale Ale or Emerson’s Pilsner, but when I saw it I though “Yeah, we’ve made it. We’re grownups now.” And I’m not the only one to think this.